£500 (or a bit more) to spend

[Meetgrinder]

Hi all - I've got a new 146 Opteron cabne 0545 chip to overclock, but wanna do it right so will be getting some decent cooling for it. Getting my overtime money in soon (it's a once a year job) so money isn't a problem up to about £500 (wife is getting the other 3k or so ), but I suppose I'll need fast/stable ram and a few other bits rather than going all out on a phase change. Or will the bits I have suffice?

I have another 939 system I can swap/change bits on:

4400 X2
2GB Geil memory 3200ddr
7800GTX
Gigabyte G power pro cooler
Asus AN8 Premium motherboard

And some bits knocking about:

Winfast 6150K8MA motherboard
2 x 512 Twinmos 3200 ddr

I also have a few power supplies which should be up to the job.

So for £500 where is the money best spent?

Memory + Watercooling kit (I also wanted to buy a cheap small beer fridge to dremel holes in and run the pipes/radiators in - nutty but I suppose someone else has done it already) ?

Better motherboard? The Asus is crap, in my experience. Overrated, overpriced, unreliable and glitchy. My system is stock but I had to disable the onboard lan to stop blue screens etc. Don't expect to buy a £140 mo board then another £15 on top for a lan card. The Winfast I bought on a whim - has onboard GFX (crap I know, but good enough for one of my machines, as all it will do is email, burn dvds, watch movies and download, other one is for games) and will probably turn out to be more reliable than the ASUS!

Phase Change? Make do with what bits I have and go all out on a phase change system? Then watch my house electric meter spin at 10,000rpm

Heatsink/fan + fast memory? Scythe Ninja or similar?

£500 to get an overclocked, fast, stable system purely for 3d games etc.

After saying all that, I quite fancy a 30" LCD monitor as well - with a bit of money juggling I can have one (I think/hope/pray)?

So £500 to spend or (at a push) a bit more to get the monitor and make do with the bits I have to overclock.

Where would your money go?

Thanks for any suggestions

 

[weescott]

Well since you posted in the Overclocking and Cooling section the Monitor idea goes right out the window!

Forget about the fridge idea...It won't work! Period!

I would go for phase change. Your ram could be run on a divider with next to no performance hit.

But most people start off with watercooling so...£200 on top end stuff to cool your GFX card too. £300 left for ram, mini fridge and beer.

 

[Webzta]

Possibly hold out for the OCZ unit - it's supposedly retailing at $299 or less, it's going to beat out any watercooling setup.

Best to wait for some reviews/release etc - before deciding on anything imo.

 

[Mr Mister]

you want to watch out with phase change though as it seems a lot of the opterons have the cold bug.

 

[Meetgrinder]

Ok thanks for that - I might see how far it will go on a stock cooler (or the one off my other machine) ad wait for tis $300 cooler, that's if it ever turns up over here. Just gotta keep my filthy mitts off the money till then... Somehow.

 

[Mrchu_]

Just gotta keep my filthy mitts off the money till then... Somehow.

Work this into an early morning mantra,over and over again for 5 minutes.replace the word filthy with something more +ve.This will do the trick

then youll have the money.

The monitor will get you far more bang for buck than 250 mhz on a cpu (imo)

Youve come into overclocking tho,so do you want to buy the fast,high htt ram?
Then someone could spec you up an air cooler that will get close to water(for stable,at anycase) for under 50 quid.